VARIABLE tuition fees for university students are New Labour's worst domestic policy mistake. This is why: "The social class gap among those entering higher education is a national disgrace. Students from middle-class backgrounds were three times more likely to go to university than those from poorer backgrounds. That vicious statistic has to be reversed." So said former secretary of state for education Charles Clarke in January 2003.

That was then; this is now. You are 18. You have slogged your guts out to be the first in your family to go to university. Next Wednesday is A level results day. You know you have done well. But that's not good enough. £3,000 annual fees, to be introduced next month, create debt and a fear of debt that mean it's a gamble you just can't take.

With fees totalling £9,000, and average living costs of £12,000, you know you can't afford to walk away owing more than £20,000. University is out of reach -- not of your ability, but of your pocket. You think about your better-off friends getting ready to go. They have the confidence, and the mummies and daddies, to pay off large debts. This is the summer of friends, places and ideas that will never be yours.

Before the tuition fees act was passed, Professor Claire Callender, author of a study commissioned by education ministers, wrote: "Variable fees increase both the costs of higher education for students and their debt. Both deter low-income groups' participation." She said the new reforms would "reassert elitism in higher education. Privileged students who populate top universities will pay high fees, but get highly valued degrees. Low income and access students who populate universities at the bottom of the hierarchy will pay less and get less, but still end up with large debts."

Now official figures show she was right. The percentage of students going to university from poor families has fallen. The number from all state schools has fallen too. Little wonder, when 47% of sixth formers questioned by the Universities Marketing Forum said that inability to afford fees was likely to put them off a degree. Poorer students' debt has already risen dramatically - by two and half times since 1998 - and is on average 43% higher than that of children from better-off families.

A Higher Education Funding Council report said teenagers in the richest areas could expect a better than 50% chance of going to university, while in the poorest neighbourhoods it is 10%. Universities are an expanding closed shop, filled by more stupid middle-class children. Why has a Labour government made that "vicious statistic" worse?

The answer lies in New Labour's uncritical acceptance of globalisation. The elite universities endlessly badgered the prime minister for funding freedom to compete with America's Ivy League. It is an argument for entrenched elitism that will be made worse by variable fees.

I was told at the time by a minister that the government had looked at 76 varieties of funding. Variable fees were picked because they most resembled the operation of a market, allowing the "best" universities to attract the "best" students, ie those who can pay most. The successful universities could then distinguish themselves from the competition. Where price equals value, competition can drive efficiency and encourage the survival of the fittest. This is what untrammelled globalisations demands.

This commercialisation of higher education serves a bigger purpose, though. It softens students up for the rigours of globalisation. By creating a market, young people are encouraged to think and behave like rational economic man. They become "human capital", calculating the rate of return on their university investment. A degree becomes a share certificate. Commercialisation conditions students to expect no help from others, or society, and therefore never to provide help in return. Debt and economic conditioning discourages graduates from going into lower-paid caring jobs - and instead into the City, where the real "value" is. It fashions a Britain that competes rather than cares.

Tony Blair has said that universities are the "coalmines of the 21st century". This is a grim, dogmatic economism that fails to chime with the beliefs of many young people who are trying to turn away from the long-hours culture of many jobs, who aren't only interested in maximising profits, but keen to work for social enterprises and charities. They want to do good, not just make good.

Variable fees haven't yet worked as well as the government hoped. With a cap of £3,000, most universities have stuck at the highest level. A few have "sold" places at £2,000 to encourage take up. But do we want universities that in effect pile them high to sell them cheap? The pressure is on to lift the fees cap, so real variability can kick in. Then the market can sort the wheat from the chaff. One former head of the funding council is predicting £5,000 by 2010. Others think £10,000 is more likely.

The government has put a financial support package together - but it's clearly not working. Instead young people are calculating that the size of debt means it's not worth the risk. Not least when globalisation ensures that many graduate jobs are being outsourced to places like India where the better qualified work for less.

If New Labour has a social philosophy it is of a meritocracy. Here the state provides the opportunity for everyone to flourish to the best of their ability. But unchecked markets mean social mobility is already declining. Variable fees will make it worse. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is chairman of the left-of-centre pressure group Compass.

IN the present global scene, non-Muslims appear to be converging on an anti-Muslim agenda because of their perceived danger from what they call `radical' Islam. What is happening in the Middle East, which can rightly be called Islam's heartland, requires the true believers to turn to the Quran for guidance and Divine help, in the inscrutable ways that the Almighty extends to those who deserve it.

Such help lends amazing strength to the material efforts that are necessary for the Muslims to protect their interests as a community constituting one-fifth of humanity.

Even the sceptics among Muslims, and there is no dearth of them, and those who are more concerned to protect their personal interests in retaining their hold on pelf and power in the Muslim world, should heed the Divine advice available in the various Suras of the holy Quran.

An attempt has been made, hereunder, to piece together these advices and edicts from the Scripture. It will appear that although they were revealed a millennium and a half ago, they are applicable to the current Middle East crisis in almost the same way as they were applicable to the situation that prevailed during the infancy of Islam in its place of origin.

It has taken a lot of labour to extract from the Book the advices that are ideally relevant for today's Muslims to fight their way with success through the hostile circumstances in which they appear to have been caught.

Apt quotations are manifold and the select ones can be arranged as such: "Take not the Jews and Christians for friends. They are friends of one another" (5:51). Should this edict not form the basis on which foreign policies of Muslim states be crafted although in a diplomatic manner to avoid dangerous confrontation with the opposite party? As we will see, the Quran never encourages reckless action oblivious of the dire consequences that may follow.

"The believers should not take disbelievers for friends in preference to believers, and who so does it has no connection with Allah, except that it is a measure of security to guard yourself against them" (3:28). The Quran never makes a rigid statement that cannot be interpreted slightly differently under special circumstances. So, in the above edict much room has been left for the Muslim societies and states to adopt a policy that would safeguard their security and not endanger their lives and liberty.

"Show kindness to them who did not wage war against you on account of your religion and deal justly with them" (60:8). This is the conciliatory and friendly face of Islam showing how Muslim individuals and states should display softness in their dealings with their non-Muslim counterparts in peace time

While, in the preceding space, the focus was on the ways in which Muslims should conduct their affairs in warlike or hostile situations, the above Quranic injunction provides the guidelines of dealings - social and political - with non-Muslim societies and states in normal times when the conflict has either subsided or resolved completely.

It needs no re-statement, because what has been stated above has made the issue abundantly clear that the Quran, revealed more than a thousand years ago, has the best advice to offer to its believers in all kinds of situations, in war and in peace, — a quality not to be expected from scripts of human origin.

Having established that the Quranic advice is available for adoption by concerned Muslim societies, or states, in varying situations of strength and weakness and during war or peace, it must be made explicit that such advice can produce the desired result only when it is acted upon with full faith by such Muslims who are not secular-minded and do not have a lurking doubt about the Divine origin of the scripture.

The Quran makes it sufficiently clear in the beginning of the first Sura (Al-Baqra) following the opening Sura (Al-Fatiha) that this book will guide only those who believe in the `unseen.'

The word `unseen' can be interpreted in many ways. No doubt, God Himself is in the centre of the `unseen' but there are myriad others - the future existence of human life after death being the main issue.

According to the Quran, the soul of man does never die; it is the mortal frame in which it survives during man's life on earth which is subject to death and decay. Not the soul, which remains preserved for accountability on the Day of Judgment.